Religious Tourism and Pilgrimages in the Central Portuguese Way to Santiago and the Issue of Accessibility

With this chapter, the authors intend to present the objectives of the research project that they have been developing related to the issue of accessibility of religious tourism and pilgrimages in the Portuguese Way to Santiago. The geographic focus covers the area of the Central Way between Porto and Valença. The developed research enables them to present and reflect on important results. Regarding accessible tourism and accessibility to cultural heritage, especially religious architectural and accommodation sites, the authors conclude that there has been a minimum investment resulting in a manifest lack of accessibility. However, at other levels the impacts have been very positive resulting in a socio-cultural development of the populations of the geographic area under study: the number of places of accommodation have increased significantly and some of these places are renovated old buildings, rehabilitating and safeguarding the architectural heritage and the memory of localities.

From Religiosity to Traumascape

This chapter theorizes on the role of death's figurations on the Western culture. The authors focus on dark tourism as the sign of a new phenomenon, which remained ignored for many sociologists and anthropologists. While the process of secularization ended the hopes and promises of religion, new forms of consumption emerged. The authors here coin the term Thana Capitalism to denote the obsession of modern society to capture the others suffering, and in so doing, perpetuating their logics of domination and surveillance. This chapter opens the doors towards a much deeper debate ignited by the needs of understanding dark tourism and its connections with religiosity.

Analysis of the Contribution of ICT to Cultural and Religious Tourism

The rise of new technologies in society have contributed to increase the tourism experience and caused changes in tourist behavior, while contributing to the acquisition of knowledge about the visited spaces, in general, and specifically to the religious tourist. Mobile technology with context-aware applications is relevant to supporting the religious tourist in their decision-making process, which in general includes searching, processing, and using information to solve problems. The methodology involved the development of a questionnaire with the objective of analyzing the influence of the use of personal technology on the religious tourism experience of places and culture in Valencia. The findings indicate that the utilization of ICT has positive implications in the cultural and religious tourism experience, mainly when visiting a cultural point of interest, and has contributed to planning a more successful trip, even contributing to adding value to the travel and to a learning experience associated with the acquisition of cultural knowledge.

The St. James Way in Portugal and Spain

Using case studies, this chapter reviews the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) to governance for pilgrimage routes in the Vía de la Plata and the Portuguese Way to Santiago (CPIS). The research is based on a set of qualitative techniques, including discussion groups, in-depth interviews, participant observation, team ethnography, and web analysis. This creates a rich and complex material for a deeper understanding of the route a stakeholder experiences. Stakeholders converge or differ in their perceptions of the actual problems of the route, while it is clearly shown how touristic principles or interests clash with other discourses focusing on integrity of historical accuracy or integrity of Xacobean values.

Accessible Tourism in Religious Destinations

People's reasons for visiting religious destinations range from being devoted pilgrims to tourists with secular motivations. People with special access go to specific shrines for curative purposes. They may be differently motivated and display different behaviors at the destination. As they must confront obstacles when travelling, they may be more constrained, leading to different behaviors in terms of satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the aim of this study is to explore the motivations of those with special access needs and those without when traveling to curative shrines, such as Lourdes, France. First, motivations of these two groups will be compared. Second, the effects of motivations on their travel behavior at the destination will be contrasted. The wide scope of visitors' motivations means that destinations must address all market segments, being crucial to ensure accessibility standards, as this affects not only people with disabilities but also seniors and families with young children.

Religious Tourism and Accessibility

This chapter presents a study of religious tourism that analyzes accessibility in two cathedrals with a great number of tourist visits. The comparison is made from universal accessibility, although specifically the motor one, sensory one, and technological access of information in both resources. The geographical area of the study has been in Spain in the Cathedral of Barcelona located in the peninsula and in the Cathedral of Palma of Majorca located in an archipelago. The longitudinal study carried out shows the comparison of the information collected in the year 2014 and July 2017. In general, the results show that throughout these years, while the Cathedral of Palma of Majorca has adapted the tourist resource to tourists with disabilities, the Cathedral of Barcelona has been evolving, although there are still measures and adaptations pending to run to approach an accessible tourism.

Volunteering in Religious Events

Religious event volunteering is a contemporary form of religious tourism that has interest for both scholars and practitioners: for the former, it is a social behavior that can be analyzed through many disciplines, consumer behavior being the one chosen here; for the latter, religious events do contribute to destinations development, although their impact is difficult to measure. This chapter explores (conceptually) the common origins of religion and volunteering and reviews briefly the event marketing to better understand the second part, which (empirically) reflects the results of two surveys undertaken with volunteers in two Catholic mega-events held in Spain. Findings show appropriateness of the consumer value-based approach as a trade-off between benefits (efficiency, social value, entertainment, and spirituality) and effort (time and effort spent) outcomes of volunteering. These value dimensions are also embedded in a chain of effects value-satisfaction-loyalty (as likelihood of repeating or/and recommending). Guidelines for organizations dealing with religious events as a form of religious tourism are offered.

The Socioeconomic Potentials of the Religious Tourism of the State of São Paulo (Brazil)

In the list of 105 pilgrimage sites in Brazil, 12 are located in the State of São Paulo. The Basilica (or Sanctuary) of Our Lady Aparecida, in Aparecida do Norte (São Paulo), is the largest pilgrimage center in Brazil and has received more than 12 million visitors per year in the last three years. In the Vale do Paraíba (State of São Paulo), of the 41 million tourists, 18 million were concentrated in the Religious Circuit. The main objective of this chapter is to discuss the proposal for the creation of a research project by the Postgraduate Program in Tourism of the School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH) of the University of São Paulo (USP), which contributes to the productive chain of religious tourism, which impact the social, cultural, economic, and human development of the State of São Paulo (Brazil). The creation of the website of the Religious Cultural Tourism Observatory of the State of São Paulo would be one of the main dissemination strategies and a relevant indicator of the evaluation of the results of the research project.

Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Tourism is an economic activity capable of promoting the development of regions, creating wealth and contributing to the preservation of heritage. Thus, the tourism sector in general, and in particular, the new typologies of tourism that take advantage of cultural resources, such as religious tourism, have in recent years become the focus of attention by economic, political and scientific agents. Religious tourism started the moment man began to move due to a question of belief, that is to say, with a religious manifestation, the pilgrimage, being a pilgrim a tourist with religious motivation. Currently, according to UNWTO estimates, between 300 and 330 million tourists visit the main religious sites every year. Taking into account the increasing interest in the subject of religious tourism and pilgrimage, a review of the academic literature on this type of tourism is carried out in this chapter by means of a descriptive bibliometric study of articles, books and of book chapters included in the multidisciplinary Scopus (Elsevier) database until the year 2016. Thus, through an advanced search for terms, we selected a representative set of 199 documents that form the ad-hoc base of the analysis. In view of the results, it is concluded that despite an uncertain start at the beginning of the 80s, from the year 2006 the interest for this discipline experiences a rapid growth with more than 80% of the work published during the 2006-2016 period. When publishing, the authors opt for specialized journals in the tourism sector in the areas of Social Sciences and Business, Management and Accounting or Arts and Humanities.

Regional Economic Effects and Marketing of Religious Tourism

Religious tourism is aimed at tourists who travel to satisfy their beliefs by visiting religious centers in various countries. With its historical and cultural background, the Konya province in Turkey is an important center of religious tourism and is a starting point that introduces tourists to the rich religious and cultural history of other parts of central Anatolia. The shrine of Mevlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, an Islamic thinker who lived in this region in the 13th century, Çatalhöyük, the oldest settlement with sacred structures in Anatolia, and Greek Orthodox Church of Agia Eleni are located within the city borders, and this makes the Konya province a significant destination for religious tourism. In this study, a questionnaire was conducted to reveal how local people of Konya perceive religious tourism. The results of the study show that the local people of Konya believe the potential of religious tourism will positively affect the city's economy, revive investments in the region, and these investments will increase employment in the region.